It was perhaps always unlikely, and even
in the heady aftermath of the Democrats’ 2012 sweep, the leadership was
cautious.But the extent to which
Steinberg, his counterpart in the Assembly John Perez, and (completely
unsurprisingly to those who have observed his opportunistic, Machiavellian
ways) Governor Jerry Brown have failed to learn the central lesson about
California’s political structure propounded by Paul and Mathews—that to do
reform right, that reform must be concerted and wholesale, or else you just end
up tacking another limb onto the Frankensteinian construction that is
California’s politics—is depressing.

Earlier this month, Steinberg declared
that the monstrosity that symbolises the need to overhaul governance in the
state—Proposition 13—is not something he’s prepared to address this year.As
quoted in the Sacramento Bee,
Steinberg has this to say about the prospects for reform: “The question of
lowering voter thresholds for the specific taxes on the local level, which is
really the beginning of that conversation...definitely should be had and
probably will be had at some point in this two-year session.But let’s have 2013 be a year where we are
focussed on bread and butter”.

I can understand that for strategic
purposes, Democrats in the legislature might want to time things
carefully.2013 might not be the
year.On the other hand, defections to
the lobbying world already temporarily deprived them of their supermajority,
signalling how fleeting their moment of governance might be.The consensus seems to be that the
Republicans will continue their inexorable decay, but I’m not sure that I’d
like to depend on that.

I hope that the Democrats do have a
serious strategy for reform, and that this isn’t simply a case of today’s
legislators’ political cowardice putting off decisions for tomorrow’s
powerbrokers, i.e. until a time when someone else is in charge, when someone
else will have to make the hard call, and when someone else might possibly have
to take responsibility for doing the right thing.

I fear that the party’s triumph in 2012
might actually have dulled their desire for reform.The Governor sold his band-aid—Prop 30—as a grand
fix, and for his own purposes is eager to pretend that he has somehow mastered
the complexity of state governance.Steinberg’s
reticence might stem from a feeling that he should defer to our anti-Governor
who has made ducking hard problems his life’s work.

Steinberg’s comments also illustrate additional
perils: namely, that Democrats—and reformers of any stripe—will revert to
practising the same piecemeal reform which—argue Paul and Mathews, quite
convincingly—got us into our current state of disarray; and secondly, that political
leaders in the state still do not understand the relationship between a broken
structure and their ability to deliver on the “bread and butter” issues.

If they want to talk about specific
thresholds for specific taxes, they are not going to fix the Crackup.They might, as previous piecemeal reformers
have done, make things worse.“Taxes”
aren’t a separate sphere of governance.State revenues are central to everything else the state does, and the
product of reform should not just be a temporary state of affairs favourable to
Democratic politicians, but a refashioned politics—a politics which is more
small-‘d’ democratic and representative; a political system less prone to
breakdown; a framework in which we reconcile the rights of voters with their
responsibilities; in which popular democracy and politics are not competing
impulses, but one and the same.

In their conclusion to California Crackup, Paul and Mathews
leave readers with the suggestion that an open hand might be the best “symbol
of the transformation California needs—the unclenching of a fist.The scroll at the state capitol in Sacramento
reads: ‘Bring Me Men to Match My Mountains!’California already has such men and women.What the state requires, and has never had, are
rules, good rules, clear and limited, and yet grand enough to match its mountains
and to meet its future” (192).

If Senator Steinberg and his caucus are seriously
interested in reconfiguring the politics of our state—and they neglect California’s
burning need for such reform at their peril—they must approach the issue in a
holistic and determined manner.Half-measures will not do, and it would be to their everlasting shame,
and that of their party, if they squandered the opportunity to govern by
failing to address what most stands between the state of our dreams and that of
our nightmares—California’s current inability to be governed.

I think I am not alone in asking Senator
Steinberg and his colleagues: “If not now, when?”

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.